Read: The Most Comprehensive Office 365 Management Resource

There’s a ton of work that goes into properly managing an Office 365 tenant. Keeping tabs on external access permissions, workspace sprawl, Team membership, data archiving and more can be incredibly time-consuming without a good plan in place.

At the same time, operational governance is essential to keeping risk in check while giving your users access to the platform’s full suite of tools. So, what’s the most viable way to manage these tasks?

Want a sneak peek? Here’s a snippet from the first chapter of the ebook. We’ll be releasing more snippets over the coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe to our blog so you don’t miss them!

Understanding Office 365 Groups and Modern Workspaces

When talking about Office 365 governance, you’re really talking about governing
Groups, the underpinning technology of the platform. You cannot understand Office 365 governance without first understanding what you’re governing.

What are Office 365 Groups?

Groups can be a confusing concept because it isn’t a tangible tool that users can access like Microsoft Teams. Rather, it’s the underlying framework for how the different tools within Office 365 are connected.

Office 365 Groups gather the identities of people who need to work together and creates a
“group identity” in Azure Active Directory.

For example, it would be cumbersome to create a Team for the Marketing Department in Microsoft Teams, add each person in the department as a member, and then repeat the process across SharePoint, OneNote, and other apps.

Prior to Office 365, the IT department typically had to grant and manage permissions for these types of workloads separately. Today, users can simply create the Team, which spins up all the resources listed above for all the members in that associated Group.

This example highlights the two factors that make Groups such a dynamic and sometimes challenging technology concept:

1. By default, all end-users can set up the service themselves without the need for IT intervention.

2. While Groups facilitate collaboration through interconnected services, they can also lead to “sprawl” and exponentially increase an organization’s consumption of Office 365.

Let’s take a closer look at both of these factors and how they can impact governance…